Kraft

by Jonas Lüscher

  * * *

  After Ivan had leaped down from the Wall on the Brandenburg Gate side and Kraft on the Tiergarten side, they didn’t have any news of each other for a long time. Kraft had written Ivan a letter in which he tried to explain in great detail his relationship to the gerbera-wielding Lambsdorff, but whereas he could usually find an explanation for almost anything—at least in those days when he felt the winds of history beneath his wings—this proved particularly difficult for him. He didn’t receive an answer. Only a few months later, when Kraft needed a best man and couldn’t think of anyone other than István Pánczél, whom he couldn’t possibly ask, for obvious reasons, did it become painfully clear to him how much he missed his friend.

  Eventually chance forced the two of them to end their silence. Ivan, who risked being pushed to the margins of academia by the course of world events, remembered the philosophical studies he had neglected in the previous years and resumed teaching and publishing in the field. Independently of each other, they both agreed to join the editorial staff of a newly founded scholarly journal and in the course of this work, they were forced to engage in sporadic e-mail correspondence, which was at first limited to purely professional matters but soon expanded to include brief postscripts of a personal nature: the announcement of McKenzie’s birth, a terse notice of the death of Kraft’s mother, the publication of a book …

  The conference in the Rocky Mountains was the first occasion on which they met in person after the rupture. Kraft felt ambivalent about the reunion. He was looking forward to seeing Ivan, but at the same time, Kraft was worried that his friend would demand accountability for his shabby behavior in the days when he, István, lay in the Berlin clinic, fighting for his sight. But then the conference was a triumph, from every point of view.

  An extremely ambitious staff member at NATO’s science program had organized this small and very exclusive panel on the rhetoric of disarmament for which an eclectic group of high NATO officials, diplomats, politicians, and military officers decorated with stars and golden fourragères were confined under high security to a winter sports hotel deserted in the off-season. As for Kraft, he owed his invitation to a slightly less ambitious staff member of the Federal Foreign Office’s Science and Technology Committee who had been charged with finding an appropriate German scholar for the conference but who couldn’t decide what would be appropriate based on the conference title and thus, for the sake of simplicity, assumed that a chaired professor of rhetoric must surely be a suitable candidate, an assumption Kraft did not contest, happy for any opportunity to escape his family.

  From the very first day, Ivan went all out and made a vocal and voluble case for a rhetoric of victors, because the velvet gloves that were now in vogue irritated him no end. He even went so far as to accuse his colleagues of having a taste for blandishment as far as their defeated foes, something he, who had suffered the effects of communism firsthand, considered completely unacceptable. He did not share their understanding of the Russians’ concern about the threat of an eastward NATO expansion and he admonished the participants again and again to keep their eyes on China and to not believe that Cuba was finished.

  Kraft immediately rallied to Ivan’s side, out of equal parts conviction and the hope that he could make amends and restore their old bonds of friendship. Together they got on their colleagues’ nerves by contradicting them nonstop with historical arguments they seemed to have at hand by the sackful, studies they could cite by the paragraph, complete with all the proper figures, and with recourse, when necessary, to obscure theorists no one but the two of them had ever heard of. In the evenings they sat on a terrace of pinewood, a bit apart from the group, looking at the Canadian forests, threaded with brown lanes and inoperative ski lifts, and drinking Crown Royal and ginger ale, reveling in memories of the old days in Berlin, thereby gracefully avoiding sensitive topics. Once in a while, an aging Italian rear admiral in a chic white uniform sat with them and listened to their conversation with a pensive smile, not understanding a word they said, but this soldier of the Cold War saw in these two valiant young men a future he had believed lost.

  chapter fourteen

  If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much.

  —HERBERT HOOVER

  If we know, then, that Kraft’s recollection of the end of his relationship with Ruth is correct, we have an advantage over him, because he stands there, looking into the distance, completely unsure whether he can still trust his memory. The ground sways beneath his feet and screams reach him from some distant world.

  All around him, people are running and shouting. The tourists are toppling like bowling pins, holding tight to their cameras. Kraft drops to the ground as well, he falls to his knees like a sinner, then farther forward, but the ground, on which he tries to brace himself with outstretched arms, is trembling and offers him no support. His arms give way, his forehead knocks against the asphalt, and he ends up flat on his stomach. Then our Kraft raises his chin and watches incredulously as the bridge before him is seized with a fit of trembling. A jolt sends a wave through the road that makes the cars hop like toys, followed by another that twists the bridge grotesquely, makes it whip even higher, and tosses the cars over the railing as if shaking off pesky insects as its steel beams groan and cables buzz and snap with the sound of overstretched guitar strings. Beams break, and with a bang the red bridge splinters and falls into the bay, which rises up roaring as the houses on the opposite shore begin to dance. The tip of the Transamerica Pyramid sways, the entire building spins halfway around its own axis and collapses with the grace of a lady in the Portuguese court. The city seems to be sliding, the grid of streets is thrown off-kilter, the high-rises on Market Street crumble, dragging each other into ruin and sending up a cloud of dust over the hills. The shaking and trembling doesn’t let up, and Kraft, still lying facedown, feels the earth’s rage spread up through his guts.

  After an eternity of minutes, the ground stops shaking, dust rains onto Kraft’s back, and through the screams of the wounded and the parents’ calls for their lost children, hundreds of car alarms blare from the parking lot. Kraft stands up, staggers, runs panic-stricken past the weeping and wailing and those trapped between the bodies of cars. A man stops him, clamps his hands on Kraft’s shoulders, and begs for help, pointing at his wife, who is lying on her back, legs outspread, crushed beneath the bronze statue of a sailor that’s fallen from its plinth and fatally violated her through the force of physics alone. Help me, help me! the man croaks, shaking Kraft as if to wake him from a nightmare. With one look at the woman’s crushed chest and protruding intestines, Kraft sees that she is beyond help and as if this appalling sight restores his sense of reason, he stops for a moment and calls his friend through the chaos: István, István.

  Kraft turns on his heel, runs back to the lookout point, climbs over the crumbled stone wall, and searches for a path down to the bay. Avoiding the landslides and leaping over deep fissures in the asphalt, he stumbles more than runs to where boats float capsized or are piled together in a chaotic mess on dry land. Kraft finds an intact rubber dinghy amid the wreck of a pier, its motor chugging, its owner no doubt floating out in the rough water with his head split open. Kraft jumps on board and steers toward the city in rubble.

  At the Ferry Building, or what’s left of it—in falling, the tower smashed the deck of a ferry docked at the pier—Kraft goes on land. Half of the Hyatt Hotel’s facade has crashed onto Market Street and Kraft looks into the gaping lobby as if into the depths of a Gursky photograph. The lightly injured carry the severely injured, survivors throw themselves on the corpses of their loved ones, and the bewildered huddle in groups and pray. Dust hangs in the air along with the smell of bricks and cement. Sirens wail by the thousands. Kraft knows he doesn’t have much time before the giant, all-devouring wave washes over the Golden Gate and engulfs the bay. Scaling rubble and dodging sprays of sparks from loose wires, ignoring the tohubohu around him, he
hurries to the spot where he assumes the building would be, in which his friend works upstairs. Beams twisted grotesquely, chunks of concrete with protruding rebar, and millions of shards of green reflecting glass are strewn where the proud ClauseVRiX Inc. tower stood. At Kraft’s feet lie the shattered remains of the neon logo with the cross pattée and not far off is a heavy oak conference table on which debris is piled. Kraft finds his friend half-buried underneath it. He stretches out beside the groaning man and brushes the hair from his forehead. Everything will be fine, István, it will all be fine. Using every ounce of his strength, he pulls his friend out from under the table, uninjured.

  Kraft sets a fallen motorcycle upright, swings himself onto the seat, Ivan sits behind him and wraps his abraded arms around his friend. They roar up Market Street in a wild zigzag, fires burn to the right and left, and looters climb into the Apple store through the jagged windows. Nearby, the first shots ring out.

  They have to get to high ground before the water comes. But Kraft still has to take care of one more thing. He makes a sharp turn onto Folsom Street, entire blocks are in flames, the old wooden houses blaze like kindling. He drives higher and higher at breakneck speed until he can go no farther. Uprooted elms block the road. Kraft and Ivan jump off the bike, scramble over the trunks, clear a way through the leaves and roots.

  They come to a stop, panting, in front of the ruins of a small pink house. Tabby, Kraft calls, Tabby! The branches of an elm protrude from the broken windows and the roof, caved in by the trunk, sags deeply between the cracked walls. Kraft yanks open the front door. Joyce lies facedown on the living room floor, her turban has slipped off to reveal a gaping wound in her bald head; a roof beam has brought her salvation. Tabby sits between Joyce’s thin shoulder blades, playing with the plastic tube of the cannula. Kraft grabs the cat, holds it tight against his chest, and leaves the scene of horror. Higher, ever higher, they run up the grassy Bernal Heights hill.

  Thousands upon thousands of San Franciscans, injured and unscathed—some have even carried the corpses of their loved ones over the protests of the living—stand on the hill, gazes fixed toward the north, from which they expect the deadly wall of water to come.

  The cat stiffens in Kraft’s arms, its ears twitch and swivel like parabolic antennae toward the Golden Gate. Groaning and wailing spreads through the crowd as the white crest of the wave appears on the horizon, spreads out to the sides, and rolls through the bay, dragging everything with it, shoving the debris of the city far inland. With a roaring and crashing that can be heard on the top of the hill, the wave destroys everything in its path that had withstood the earthquake.

  Still holding the cat, Kraft pushes his way with Ivan through the survivors to the south side of the hill and from there they watch the wave as it buries Silicon Valley beneath it, expands the bay, and washes water up to the foot of the mountains. They see the start-ups and tech companies, the staid industrial buildings, and the rubble of the glass office buildings being swept away to the south toward the campus of Stanford University. The tower filled with books on war, revolution, and peace withstands the approaching mass of water for a disappointing moment, but then gives way, breaks apart, and releases its accumulated knowledge. There goes the conference, Kraft says to himself …

  He opens his eyes: the red bridge before him, the Transamerica Pyramid upright on the opposite side of the bay, and the tourist taking photographs. No, the city would never do him that favor. Kraft returns to his car, noses into the rush-hour traffic, and crosses the bridge. He has to return the rental car.

  * * *

  Things don’t look good for Kraft. He has exactly twenty-four hours before the start of the conference and he is farther from finding an answer to the prize question than he was three weeks ago, when he was wrestling with a package of wasabi peas thirty thousand feet over Arkansas and his triumph over the recalcitrant foil package brought with it a certainty of victory he believed he was entitled to, given his intellectual superiority.

  An hour ago, he had opened PowerPoint and searched for Tübingen University’s presentation template, which his secretary had installed for him. Maybe that’s the right path, since there’s no time left to write a polished lecture; just fill in a few slides with sonorous bullet points and improvise from there. But since his visit to Johanna, he’s been carrying around a sense of shame that inhibits all larger thoughts and restricts the soaring flight of his intellect, on which he otherwise could always rely, to a timid circling around her parting words—like a housefly on a stovetop, Kraft thinks.

  * * *

  But isn’t it past time to ask ourselves why Kraft’s financial situation has been mentioned on at least a couple of occasions as being among the reasons he finds himself unable to write, and from which we then deduced, in combination with his family situation, the existential necessity for him to impress the jury—that is, Tobias Erkner in particular? Are Kraft’s finances in such a terrible state that Heike will only agree to a divorce if he brings home the million dollars because she’s worried that she won’t be able to provide adequately for herself and the twins? Such is, in fact, the case, although Kraft brings home a respectable monthly salary as a full professor and in some months Heike herself—depending on the assignment flow at her higher-ed consulting firm, which she founded shortly after the birth of the twins—contributes as much or even more to the family income.

  We must look much further in the past for the source of the problem, back to the moment when Ruth took her youngest son by the hand and disappeared with both boys to Berlin for good, since although Kraft sat down after reading her letter, opened a bottle of wine, and toasted both his restored friendship with Ivan as well as his new freedom, and didn’t have a single thought to spare for Ruth or his two sons, at least not on that evening, it would be too easy to see him as a monster without a conscience, especially since he saw himself as an honorable man and commissioned a lawyer the very next morning to draw up an alimony agreement with Ruth so that she and their sons would be generously supported.

  He kept the apartment in Tübingen—he hadn’t yet completely wiped away his dreams of a bourgeois family—took out a second mortgage, and paid out Ruth, who bought herself an apartment and a studio in Berlin, had them insulated by a professional, and, with the money left over, purchased the complete works of Freud, read about half, and finally took up her artistic work again.

  When Kraft carried Heike, already pregnant with the twins, across the threshold six years later, it was clear that he had overstretched his resources. The interest on the mortgages and the generous support he still provided for Ruth and his sons ate up his professor’s salary month after month. By his mid-forties, he had neither put anything aside nor paid anything off.

  Indeed: his sons … Adam let his mother take his hand and, completely unaffected by the unusual events, he kept talking. He never looked back, not once, nor was he silent for a single moment during the long train ride to Berlin, instead he began to picture his future in the new city in dazzling colors as if he were hoping to find a larger audience for his monologues there. It never was clear to any of those involved whether Adam missed his father or not. Prattling merrily, he visited Kraft in Tübingen on school holidays, drove to Tuscany or Greece with him, chattering and nattering all the while; and, blathering cheerfully, he left his father behind at the end of the vacation. His relationship with his mother, on the other hand, became increasingly strained because Ruth, after self-medicating with half of Freud, had placed herself in the hands of a gifted therapist who advised her, if she were to feel the old weakness coming on in the presence of a blatherer, to start singing “Hava Nagila,” tapping the rhythm out with her index finger on her tragus, the small prominence of cartilage in the middle of the outer ear. When Adam had rambled on as an adolescent, this habit of his mother’s led to ever more frequent rows, so Ruth was by no means unhappy when he decided at fourteen to finish his education at a boarding school in England. Ruth willingly sacrificed the sm
all inheritance she had received from an aunt for this undertaking, informed Kraft by telephone, and let him take over the not inconsiderable balance of the tuition fees, under the threat of sending Adam back to Tübingen if he refused. Kraft volubly and eloquently countered this plan, which he denounced as an inappropriate vote of no-confidence in the German educational system, but he quickly acquiesced when he got the impression Ruth was again humming a Jewish folk song at the other end of the line, a strange new habit he found particularly disagreeable and that led Kraft into mistaken doubts regarding his ex-wife’s mental health. The English boarding school was thus an additional strain on Kraft’s finances, and as he had feared, after Adam had finished his A-levels, the boy naturally felt that German universities too wouldn’t be good enough for him, and consequently Kraft had to wire tuition fees in pounds sterling every six months, a burden that continues to the present day with regard to Adam’s business school studies. Adam’s decision to pursue a business degree of all things was not one to ease the pain of this financial sacrifice, since Kraft considers “businessmen” to be in general nothing more than talented salesmen who’ve adorned themselves with an academic aura. But Kraft would also have to admit that after Adam’s voice changed, his jabbering—to which one could, earlier, with a measure of goodwill, have attributed an innocent, childlike charm—drifted more and more in the direction of carnival barking, and so he happened to fit into his current surroundings very well.

  As for Kraft’s relationship with his first son, we must unfortunately admit that the ties that bound them in the years when they lived together as a family proved too weak to withstand the seven hundred kilometers between Berlin and Tübingen. Kraft was never able to establish for himself a significant place in his son’s life, which we must, in all fairness, point out was not solely attributable to his insufficient level of engagement, but also to the—as he saw it—unhealthy symbiotic relationship that had been established between mother and son due to the lack of a male attachment figure … a role Ackerknecht was neither willing nor able to fill.